Regardless, he has gone beyond “merely” equating the email server hyped-by-him story into an outrage-worthy scandal “worse than Watergate.” He is saying this to hysterically happy cheering crowds that now that Comey has, Trump wants them to believe, all but had the FBI perp walk with Hillary in cuffs en route directly to prison.

If Trump wasn’t in a coke fueled haze and so busy groping women during his playboy days in the early seventies he couldn’t have missed the facts as they spun out of control once the Woodward and Bernstein nuclear bombshell exploded, and the Oval Office tapes came out.

He knows that there is no way on God’s green earth or in the marble and gold leaf halls of Trump Tower that even at it’s worse, the email server problem is a worse scandal than Watergate. He and his surrogates all know that it was at worst a case of very poor judgement by the less than Internet savvy Hillary. They also know what we know that the people to blame are the IT people who advised her to use a private server.

If Trump had a real sense of humor instead of making a leering joke about Anthony Weiner, “you know what I mean,” something his audience didn’t even appear to get, he’d promise to do what Gerald Ford did with Nixon.

That would be moderately funny. However his audience would probably boo because he has them so vehemently convinced Hillary is a demon they want her in prison, or worse.

What do Kellyanne and Steve Cortes have in common with Reagan and Lucille Ball?

The answer is obvious from my photo. They made money selling something harmful to your health. They were shills for a product that even before the Surgeon General’s report when I was a kid was called cancer sticks.

Pence and Trump.

Nobody was interviewing the Hollywood stars and sports celebrities asking them how they could possibly advertise products that years down the road would be killing millions of people.

Even Joy Reid who is probably the best at exposing the lies of her Trump surrogate guests handles them with the respect due to any spokesperson for a candidate for president.

I bet she wishes that off camera she could ask them how they hell they can support a candidate like Trump. No doubt they have learned from the Access Hollywood video that they always have to assume there’s a hot mike, so they won’t say what they really feel.

My hunch is that some of them are doing it both for the money and because they enjoy the limelight. Others may be true believers. With the exception of Conway who has a job to go back to, they also know they are auditioning for Fox News and whatever form Trump TV is going to take.

To put it simply, while I don’t see any evidence Hillary Clinton has ever done anything one could realistically call corrupt, let alone prison-worthy, Trump and his stooges have been calling her “corrupt Hillary” ever since the email tempest began. Now of course he and his creepizoid contingent and even liberal commentators are calling the Comey letter is a bombshell.

One fairly reasonable Trump supporter on MSNBC said a voter’s choice comes down to whether they want to vote for crazy or corrupt. His view was that crazy was a better choice than corrupt.

To say that to compare the well documented and repeatedly manifest demonstrations of Trump’s mental instability to the unproven allegations of Hillary being corrupt is to draw a false equivalence. This is a common mistake in logic: that is “a fallacy to be perpetuated is one shared trait between two subjects is assumed to show equivalence, especially in order of magnitude, when equivalence is not necessarily the logical result. False equivalence is a common result when an anecdotal similarity is pointed out as equal, but the claim of equivalence doesn't bear because the similarity is based on oversimplification or ignorance of additional factors.” Wikipedia

This all being said, if Hillary was as corrupt as Boss Tweed I would still say that I’d rather have a sane corrupt president than a crazy one.

My hunch is that as few votes will be changed by the latest email news as the latest groping allegation against Trump. Trump will waste time ranting about this, making more out of it than there seems to be (the emails didn’t come from Hillary’s email server), and not talking about policy off the teleprompter. Good!

A Trump stooge just basically admitted that Trump draws huge crowds because he’s unhinged and he entertains them. Samantha Guthrie (on MSNBC) should have nailed him on that: “Do you think that qualifies him to be Commander in Chief?"

Just in case you haven’t read about the latest woman to come forward to accuse Trump of

groping her:

Another woman has come forward to accuse Donald Trump of unwanted sexual contact. Ninni Laaksonen, Miss Finland in 2006, is one of more than a dozen women accusing Trump of such behavior. A local Finnish newspaper reported that Laaksonen claims Trump grabbed her while she was in New York during her tenure as Miss Finland, just before she appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman. Laaksonen took a photo with Trump and three other contestants outside of the studio.

“Trump stood right next to me and suddenly he squeezed my butt. He really grabbed my butt,” she said. “I don’t think anybody saw it but I flinched and thought: ‘What is happening?’” One of the most read papers in the UK posted this: www.telegraph.co.uk/…

My wife’s last name was Korpinen… typically most Finn names sound alike. We grew cranberries in Massachusetts which had numerous growers of Finnish descent. Most of them were and are staunch Republicans, even her parents. In fact only my wife, a close friend, and her cousin were Democrats.

This is from Snopes: On 22 May 2016 the Facebook page "Proud Liberals" published the above-reproduced image purportedly depicting a bikini-clad Melania Trump (nee Knauss), wife of 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump, posing for GQ magazine, set alongside a picture of First Lady Michelle Obama:

The photographic comparison caused a stir, as well as questions as to whether the woman shown on the right was indeed Mrs. Trump. The latter issue was easily resolved, as on 4 March 2016 the British version of GQpublished an item titled "The Future First Lady? See Melania Trump's Nude Photo Shoot." GQ noted that the photo shoot with which the image in question originated antedated Donald Trump's presidential run by 15 years, and the original publication of the photographs took place before Knauss married the current GOP frontrunner:

There’s even more to this: The release of the photos from the nude and nearly nude photo shoot coincided with the comments Trump made about the Khan family. This led to speculation that Trump release them to distract from that controversy.

However, we'd have to ask if Trump actually wants distraction from his supposed stupidity. Throughout his election campaign, Trump has constantly stoked up ignorance and fear of Muslims in the US. Trump has consistently sought out headlines that reveal his phobia of Muslims. It's textbook dog whistle politics.

As Salon says, "The suggestive picture of Trump’s former model wife, from a shoot for British GQ in 2000, was used by an anti-Trump group hoping to gin up Mormon voters with appeals to their morality in an effort to ramp up the anti-Trump vote.” from www.gq-magazine.co.uk/...

It’s been bad enough watching Trump’s number one unpaid stooge (above left) just about every day. He makes my skin crawl. The two primary unpaid surrogates will disappear after the election into the swampland of Fx News, thank goodness. (Maybe there will be a Rudy and Newt segment of Fox. Ben will go back to being a surgeon. Chris will be in court or prison.)

After Trump is buried in a landslide of delusional fraudulent votes I’ll enjoy a few days of Kellyanne and her cadre of Keystone Cops having to eat their words like bowls of slimy grubs.

Then I’ll say a not-fond goodby to the paid stooges them, who I no longer care to mention. You know who they are. We’re all sick of them.

Until yesterday Rudy was enjoying his time in the limelight as the go-to unpaid stooge. Mr. Creepy even made his way into living rooms during the Al Smith dinner, no doubt scaring a lot of little kids.

Newt seemed to be an also ran behind Rudy stooging for Trump, and frightening the kiddies. That all changed yesterday when he couldn’t control his misogyny and his fat-faced mouth with Megan Kelly, my nominee for Emmy for the best two minute ripping a new one of a Trump surrogate.

She was the consummate calm, cool, and collected professional. A 10th degree aikido black belt couldn’t have used her opponents attack momentum to throw him across the room better. Her double barrel comebacks seemed spontaneous and were the best I’ve ever heard. To the accusation that she was fascinated by sex, what better response than “I am fascinated by the protection of women.” And to the man she respectfully referred to with his former title, the final words “you can take your anger issues and spend some time working on them, Mr. Speaker” were classic.

Quote of the Day:

“Hoping you women out there who have any ‘class or dignity’ remember what this ‘crude obnoxious megalomaniacal mutt’ really thinks about women, someone needs to pull him by that useless twinkie he thinks is worth gold, Rosie is a disgusting pig you pos.” No way you’ll guess who said this.

Donald Trump “insults us every day” and is “selling people a bill of goods,” and so he will cast his vote for fellow ex-secretary Clinton. Powell has previously resisted declaring his support for either candidate, but has chided Trump as a “national disgrace.” In leaked emails, however, Powell was also seen bashing Clinton, of whom he said: “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”

She scores up everything she touches? Really, absolutely everything?

And she screws everything up with hubris (def: excessive pride or self-confidence)?

Oh come on former Secretary State Colin “Yellow Cake Uranium” Powell… give us a break!

Well, I suppose if you are so utterly inept that everything you touch you’re going to screw it up, you might as well go whole hog and screw it up with hubris.

My late wife indulged my wanting to have the biggest screen TV that would fit in the space we had. When I moved from Massachusetts to Oregon I didn’t take anything besides some clothes and artwork, just what would fit in the trunk of my car. So one of the first things I bought here was a 55” Samsung TV (right).

Now I am “treated” to images of Trump so vivid and detailed I can see the pores on his fish face. Recently I thought I could see the flop sweat starting on his brow. Today I saw beads of sweat on Boris Epshteyn’s upper lip. Yea!

What bothers me the most is bringing the Trump crowds into my living room in high definition. On my screen each person in the crowd is easily visible. They’re all five inch tall little zombie people. Hundreds of them not just cheering but chanting like banshees. It’s like they’re possessed.

I was watching tonight and this was really bothering me.

Then Rachel showed the Hillary rally where my old senator Elizabeth — as my wife would have said — cut Trump a new one.

The five inch tall cheering Hillary supporters made me glad I had the TV. Focus, Hal, don’t let it get to you too much, after the election no amount of Viagra will restore their pre-election erections.

I am not embarrassed to say that I watch a lot of television. I have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu streaming video. I’m always on the lookout for shows like “Hell on Wheels,” about building the transcontinental railroad, or the two seasons of the British “Black Mirror,” kind of like an updated “Twilight Zone.”

I’m thinking that once I don’t have to look at a nearly life-sized Kellyanne Conway or Trump’s slimy groper grouper mouth, and the newer model LG televisions come out, perhaps I will celebrate Hillary’s landslide and the Democrats winning the Senate by treating myself to one.

I know my wife would say that was fine with her.

P.S.

OMG — there’s a life sized David Duke on my screen. Rachel reports that he is high enough in the polls for the Louisiana Senate race debates. He polls 5.1% of voters in the state, .1% of the 5% needed to be allowed to participate in a November 2 debate.

I’ve been curious about Trump’s pathological lying since when his lies spun out of control. I’ve had conversations about it with my fellow psychotherapists. None of use could really figure it out. Could it be that he really believed the lies as they flowed out of his mouth? No there’s a possible answer. I new scientific study suggests that the more a person lies the more their brain accepts the lie as true.

The just published study (right) described in the Vox article explains this as “emotional adaptation.”

It’s similar to what happens when you’re exposed to a strong smell. At first the smell is extremely noticeable, but eventually you stop noticing it as much. With time, any stimulus — a loud noise, a strong perfume, etc. — is likely to provoke a smaller response. The same goes with lying.

In summary, Tali Sharot, a University College London neuroscientist, an author of the study said:

“Arousal is one of the telltales of lying,” Sharot said. It can take the form of sweating and faster heart rate — what polygraph machines look for to detect lies. So if the brain is less aroused by lying, that might mean a person is getting used to it. “If arousal goes down, people may be less likely to catch you in a lie,” Sharot said.

Okay, then what about the whole pathological liar accusations and descriptions we hear applied to Trump?

You may be surprised to learn that there’s no psychiatric diagnosis for this. This is from Psychiatric Times, 2008. “Pathological Lying: Symptom or Disease?” byCharles C. Dike, MD, MPH, MRCPsych

Pathological lying (PL) is a controversial topic. There is, as yet, no consensus in the psychiatric community on its definition, although there is general agreement on its core elements. PL is characterized by a long history (maybe lifelong) of frequent and repeated lying for which no apparent psychological motive or external benefit can be discerned. While ordinary lies are goal-directed and are told to obtain external benefit or to avoid punishment, pathological lies often appear purposeless. In some cases, they might be self-incriminating or damaging, which makes the behavior even more incomprehensible. Despite its relative obscurity, PL has been recognized and written about in the psychiatric literature for more than a century. The German physician, Anton Delbruck,1 is credited with being the first to describe the concept of PL. He observed that some of his patients told lies that were so abnormal and out of proportion that they deserved a special category. He sub-sequently described the lies as "pseu- dologia phantastica."

“Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information, and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it.”So reflected Freud in 1920. Having spent 20 years toiling away in labs, peering down microscopes, he arrived at the conclusion that the questions he wanted to answer about the human mind couldn’t be answered by what was then understood—or understandable—about the human brain. The knowledge wasn’t there, and neither were the tools. He continued to emphasize, however, that eventually, long after his own lifetime, the moment would come when brain science would be ready to fill out the psychoanalytic principles that he was busy laying down.

My psychotherapy training was psychodynamic and psychoanalytically oriented. But Freud himself began as a student of neurology, studying the brain, not the mind. His greatest discovery, the one that its him on the short list of the world’s greatest thinkers, was of the unconscious, or of the id, ego, and superego.

But even Freud said that he thought that in time major revelations about how the mind worked would come from studies of how the brain worked.

Now with the amazing advances in brain imaging beyond CT scans: functional-MRI’s, PET Scans, Magnetoencephalography (MEG), NIRS (near infrared spectroscopy), a new field of studying the way the brain works has opened.

Trump’s Mosul Tweet prove his narcissistic rage has no conscience… and we will get to say Fuck You.

We know it is Trump’s wish that he can claim that an ISIS victory in Mosul is Obama and Hilary’s fault. I’ve concluded that there are no depths to which Trump won’t go to express his narcissistic rage as he anticipates the idea of losing.​Add this to his trying to invalidate our election — to the entire world — by doubling and tripling down on his outright lie about our election system being rigged.

From the way the battle to re-take ISIS is going I think there’s a good change that either it will be clear ISIS is losing badly, or they have already lost before the election.

The shameless Trump Tweet (right) is beyond the pale in so many ways.

It could be argued that this is the most egregious example of Trump’s narcissistic rage.

The garden variety narcissist expresses the rage that follows narcissistic injury which is defined as a major blow to their grandiose self-image. At the worst they may lash out like a cornered wounded animal.

Trump’s Tweet is historic. It is probably the only example of a presidential candidate rooting for the enemy.

I wrote……”we need to understand narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage. We must understand what happens when circumstances drive extreme narcissists into a state of rage, and consider what might happen when one has the power to influence and persuade a significant portion of the population to act out.”

"Narcissistic rage is the response of a narcissist to anything they perceive as a threat to their ego, their control or their power. It is usually intense, out of proportion, often random and is used to manipulate."

This is what we can expect: "And at the same time the narcissist may also be plotting how to get revenge on the person who dared to challenge them. So the person gets twice the punishment...!"

Instead of his directing his rage against only person (Hillary Clinton) he may direct it against the system.

Joy Reid had Tony Schwartz, the outspoken author of “The Art of the Deal” on this morning. Schwartz has taken up the void of the absent mental health professionals who are most qualified to explain the psychopathology of Donald Trump.

Not that these psychotherapists don’t have opinions about Trump, but they been scared away from expressing them publicly by the admonition against doing so by the American Psychiatric Association. Of course this only applies to psychiatrists, by those in other mental health professions have taken this as a rule.

This doesn’t apply to me since I’ve have written many stories here about my impressions of Trump’s diagnosis.

The lack of credible experts to explain the unusual mix of narcissistic and other psychopathology that adds up to what some have referred to as “Trumpism” leaves it to others, in particular David Corn, who have only second hand observations of Trump. However, Schwartz is unique in that he spent a year and a half with Trump.

Thus what he had to say this morning is especially illuminating.

He described the neurology (using terms prefrontal cortex and amygdala) to describe how he doesn’t think Trump has conscious control when he say some things. He just talked about deep narcissistic injury… and us shrinks aren’t supposed to talk about Trump’s psychopathology. He pointed to his own head to illustrate how what Hillary said at the debates went into his brain and out his mouth without any intermediate conscious mediation.

Smallest vocabulary of any person that’s ever run for public office … 200 word… Schwartz

"Trump doesn’t know the words irony, nuance, subtly”

"He feels like a cornered rat."

​“Narcissism has evolved into paranoia"

He suspects hundreds of women have had that experience with Trump

"He isn’t capable of caring about anyone, he’s so needy himself, there isn’t any left to give to anybody else —“

Saturday, Oct. 22, 2016

Click above to read and make comments on Daily Kos

I can’t find any Kos stories about Jessica Drake, the client of Gloria Allred who is the 11th woman to accuse Donald Trump of sexual misconduct.

He can’t deny knowing her because she has a photo of the two of them together.

Rather than excerpting biographical sections from her up to the minute Wikipedia profile which ends with ...

On October 22, 2016 Drake and attorney Gloria Allred held a news conference where Drake accused Republican presidential candidate and businessman Donald Trump of sexual misconduct and of offering her US$10,000.00 to join him in his suite during a golf tournament in Florida in 2006.

While her life story is unusual among the 11 women what she does share with the 10 others is that like them she comes across as highly credible…. credible, sincere, engaging, and likable.

Trump stood on hallowed ground today and announced that he was going to sue every woman who dared to lie about him. It occurred to me, and the commentators on MSNBC, that he just might not have all that much time to engage in 11 lawsuits (and likely countersuits) while still being president.

I thought perhaps he could do his presidential work in the wee hours of the morning, though it might be difficult to schedule meetings at 1:00 AM. But then I realized this would impinge on his Tweeting time.

It’s amazing to me, hell, it’s amazing to all my friends and to — well I assume each and every Cossack — that three-quarters of Republicans polled by YouGov don't feel that sexual assault attacks by Donald Trump would disqualify him from the presidency.

Unfracking-beliavable...

I was surprised to see that the little piece I wrote below and posted on Daily Kos last night got moved to the Most Shared list and stayed on for 24 hours and was shared an Facebook 1,224 times.

Friday, Oct. 19, 2016

Evening update:

Just letting everyone not watching Rachel know about this. Another example of her stellar research staff. They discovered that somebody plagiarized his best joke from an R.J. Matson cartoon (see www.rjmatson.com/… for more of his work) which was on Roll Call.

The New Yorker article begins with this...

The media is even more biased this year than ever before. You want the proof? Michelle Obama gives a speech and everyone loves it. It's fantastic. They think she's absolutely great. My wife Melania gives the exact same speech and people get on her case. And I don't get it. I don't know why. And it wasn't her fault. Stand up, Melania. Come on. She took a lot of abuse. Oh, I'm in trouble when I go home tonight. She didn't know about that one. Am I OK? Is that OK?

How highly Rachel is regarded? Awhile back she got a night before exclusive about the first Newsweek bombshell. Tonight she got an exclusive from the next New Yorker which has an article praising Hillary.

No comments:

What do I think about and what I do I think about it?

May, 1, 2016

I migrated everything from April to the basement file cabinet, so fitting of Spring, this blog starts anew, unfortunately, again it’s Trump on my mind. The archives for the two months I have been sharing cyberspace with billions of bloggers are below.

If you are a new reader, welcome. I do this blog alone, but always welcome critiques and ideas from you, I mean you, whoever is actually reading these words.